LIN101H5 Midterm: LIN100 Midterm Review.doc

• School: UTM
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LIN101H5
• Professor: Arsalan Kahnemuyipour

Document Summary

Modern lings are descriptivists, and not prescriptivists. Ie. they are interested in what the facts are, and not what they should be. Prescriptivists: tell you what you should do. What is rule-governed? language has the rules and grammar. Language: system of sounds, words and sentence patterns used by humans to communicate thoughts and feelings. Speaking vs writing lings tend to work on spoken lang bc: everyone learns spoken lang but there are illiterate ppl, it does not require explicit teaching, as opposed to writing, there are human langs with no writing system. Phonetics & phonology: knowledge of the sound system, its inventory + rules. Morphology: knowledge of rules of word formation. Syntax: knowledge of rules of sentence formation. Semantics: knowledge of the system of meanings. Competence: enables speakers to use a finite set of rules to produce or comprehend an infinite number of sentences they have generally never heard before, no limit on the length of the sentence.